UBC: Brooks, The Mountain Meadows Massacre

The Mountain Meadows Massacre by Juanita Brooks

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Juanita Brooks was a very brave person.

Writing less than a hundred years after the massacre and--as she states clearly--being a devout and loyal Mormon, she had the courage to (a) ask questions, (b) find answers, and (c) publish what she found, despite the fact that her findings were not favorable to the Mormon Church or many of its important early members, including Brigham Young. The book is fascinating as, in-and-of-itself, a historical artifact and as a work of historiography, talking about how history is made.

It is not a perfect book. I don't find Brooks a particularly compelling writer, stylistically, and she has the problem endemic to historians of her generation, of assuming that the motivations of Native Americans are irrecoverable and incomprehensible (and, yes, she does at one point compare the Paiutes to children). And hers is a first pass at the historiographical archaeology of the massacre at Mountain Meadows; historians coming after her, who had her work to build on, were able to dig deeper and extract more delicate shades of nuance. But she proves that the Mountain Meadows Massacre was the brainchild of the Mormons and that Mormon men participated, and held positions of leadership, in the massacre; and she proves that John D. Lee got thrown under the bus by his religious brethren. He was certainly guilty, but if he was guilty, so were a host of other men, all of whom walked away scot free while Lee was executed. The massacre exhibits one of the lows that human nature can sink to; the aftermath demonstrates another.



View all my reviews